509 Quotes by Philip Roth

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

The ordeal is part of the commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions...

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?